Cause unknown

But it's definitely not wind and solar.

Five months have passed since the blackout that paralysed the Iberian Peninsula. A lot can change in five months but the threat of future blackouts is, apparently, not in that lot. In fact, the Spanish grid operator just issued an urgent warning that it had “detected steep voltage swings in the system over the past two weeks that are capable of affecting power supply in the country.” The government had five days to act, it said on Wednesday, meaning the deadline is now down to two days.

The warning followed the release of an in-depth report by ENTSO-E, the network of European grid operators, which also cited, per Reuters, “a surge in voltage” as the cause of the April blackout. So, one would ask, what caused that surge in voltage? Well, that is unknown but, according to a statement by the chairman of ENTSO-E’s board, it was not wind and solar, and now I’ve got an outrage-related headache.

Said chairman, by the name of Damian Cortinas, said there was zero evidence of a cyberattack and added that “neither Spain’s increasing reliance on renewable energy nor its limited power interconnections with other countries had played a role.” Whereby he lied, as laid out in the very report the network he represents released a week ago.

From the report (page 10): “Between 12:32:00.000 and 12:32:57.000, there was a loss of 208MW identified distributed wind and solar generators in northern and southern Spain, as well as an increase in net load in the distribution grids of approximately 317MW, which might be due to the disconnection of small embedded generators <1MW (mainly rooftop PV) or to an actual increase in load or to a combination of both.”

The very next sentence? “The reasons for these events are not known.”

Further, the report detailed the events of the day of the blackout saying that “major disconnection events occurred in the regions of Granada, Badajoz, Sevilla, Segovia, Huelva, and Cáceres, which resulted in an additional loss of generation of at least 2GW (the effects of frequency deviation suggest a loss of even 2.2GW).”

Then, “This phase of major disconnection events started some milliseconds after 12:32:57 with the tripping of a generation transformer in the region of Granada due to the activation of an over-voltage protection in the 220kV side of a 400/220kV transformer, which connects several generation facilities (photovoltaic, wind and thermo-solar) to the transmission grid. The transformer was injecting 355MW into the grid and the voltage at the 400kV level was 417.9kV at this time.”

Lastly, I promise, “The next event consisted of two sets of trips, resulting in an additional loss of around 725MW of PV and thermosolar facilities connected to two 400 kV transmission substations in the area of Badajoz. In the first substation, an evacuation line tripped at 12:33:16.460. The voltage at 400 kV level, at the time of this trip was 435,4kV but this value, due to the way PMUs calculate and timestamp phasors, could already be influenced by the generation loss. In the second substation, the trip occurred at 12:33:16.820; the reasons for these two trips are not known.”

ENTSO-E noted that April 28 was an average spring day, with plenty of stable (yes, stable) solar generation and some wind fluctuations but not very dramatic. No wonder the cause is “not known”, except there is wonder because here’s what California’s ISO has to say about seasonal variations in wind and solar output: “Solar curtailment occurs most frequently in spring and fall when demand is low because moderate weather, and sunny, breezy days produce an abundant supply of renewable generation.”

So, in case anyone was still wondering why Spain’s grid operator is sounding the alarm now, that’s why. All the trips along the road to disaster were related to solar installations. Here’s a snapshot of a really handy, really detailed chronological table of all the imbalances before, during, and after the disaster began:

The report is, as you can see in the snapshot, 264 pages. One would assume the media would cover it factually if one lived in a self-constructed perfect world. Of course they didn’t and I’m afraid some barely veiled expletives will follow.

“The report does not blame renewable energy sources or an excess of them for the incident. The report does not identify inertia problems during the day of April 28, but it does point to some significant problems in controlling the voltage of the electrical system,” some mediocre solar pusher claimed. Yes, it bleeping does. It so does blame them, in a most elaborately roundabout way, but it does.

The solar pusher, however, is clearly not an expert in disinformation. Here’s Euronews for your pleasure: Obsolete electricity grid triggered blackout in Portugal and Spain, experts reveal. No, they didn’t. It’s obvious few would read the whole report but counting on this obviousity to literally disinform people is just ugly.

And here’s NPR, another expert in the dubious art of disinformation, and I don’t care that’s three “disinformations” in two paragraphs: “Now a new report from an expert panel of European grid operators details what happened. The report finds that for the first time in Europe, a voltage surge caused the massive outage. Voltage needs to remain within limits for an electrical grid to work. While many things went wrong, the problem was not a power grid with too much wind or solar, says Chris Rosslowe, a senior energy analyst at Ember who was not involved in drafting the report.”

Okay, excuse me while I take a deep breath to steady my frail emotional state. Done. The problem, as detailed by ENTSO-E, was exactly that there was too much solar on the grid at one time. It wasn’t that “many things went wrong”. One thing went wrong — the voltage surge — and it started the avalanche that resulted in the blackout. I’m genuinely curious how the people capable of saying things like that in all seriousness look at themselves in the mirror. It’s a peculiar form of psychopathy where the patient is convinced that whatever they say automatically turns into truth.

The actual truth, per Bloomberg: “The output of Spanish gas-fired power plants has jumped 58% since the April 28 nationwide outage, according to data from Entso-E. This is being done to better stabilize the network, with cheaper wind generation curtailed to balance the power mix, while soaring temperatures across Europe increase the use of air conditioning.” Solar is also being curtailed, for no discernible reason whatsoever, it seems, since the blackout wasn’t their fault. I can’t wait for the next blackout and how many unknown causes investigators would fail to identify.